Is Sweden a land of one‐dimensional men?; The New Totalitarians By Roland Huntford. 354 pp. New York: Stein & Day. $10.

Inhabitants of a freezing cold country, one imagines, are apt to identify strongly with such comforts and culture as it affords. A snowy night with temperatures at‐77 degrees is no place for sturdy devilmay‐care individualism. As for the neighbors, it is important to stay on good terms with them.

If, further, such a country's culture has been thoroughly monolithic and homogeneous for thousands of years, and for the last 500 has admitted only one religion, one state and one ethos—then the citizen's identification of self with his society is apt to be absolute. And if, to cap all, a democratically‐elected majority party, of Marxist leanings, and one which has thoroughly learned every modern persuasive and manipulative technique, remains in power for four decades—then such a country will be well on the way to realizing the ultimate horror: One‐Dimensional Man.

Such at least is the thesis of Roland Huntford, Stockholm correspondent of The London Observer. Contemporary Sweden, he says, is just such a society.

Huntford is not the first writer to suspect that, so far from being the most up‐to‐date of Europeans, the Swede is in many respects medieval; corporate through and through. But “The New Totalitarians” is the first detailed critique and expose of the Social Democratic regime. For all sorts of historical and psychological reasons, Huntford says, contemporary Sweden has become the very paradigm of the “collusive” society. Nowhere is oppression less painful, or more complete.

There was, for instance, the case of the Chemists’ Association. The Social Democratic Government, radical by definition, is always happy to accept pressure from its own left. (Pressures from the inert right it can always afford to ignore.) Looking around for some suitable object for nationalization, it picked on the relatively defenseless chemists. Underhand representations were made to the Association's secretariat, who saw the point. Without even informing its members or giving them chance to rally to their own defense, it bargained away their liberties for a handsome cash compensation. It was one more fait accompli, among all the others.

As a Social Democrat spokesman put it: “First of all the Young Socialists had agitated for nationalization, then the other popular organizations agreed, and the party accepted it. That meant that the people wanted it. When everything was decided, then we could let the Riksdag Parliament; vote. I mean, that's what democracy's all about, isn't it?”

What makes Huntford's AngloSaxon hackles rise is less the cleverness and thoroughgoing eptitude of the Social Democratic persuasioncum‐administration machine — after all, it's the business of a governing party to govern—than the supine attitude of the Swede‐in‐the‐street. It is, he says, the Swede's loathness to controvert, his willingness to be led by the nose “in his own best interests,” his utter indifference to abstract principles, and his smug assumption that his own society's high standard of living makes it superior to all others, that enable the Social Democratic regime to aspire, successfully, not only to run the country's economy, its politics and its culture, but even its citizens’ very souls, their innermost evaluations.

Willy‐nilly, Huntford says, the exLutheran Swede is being lured into the socialist theophany: the brave new world where everyone will live on spiritual pap and self‐evident ideas forever. Democracy, as AngloSaxons know it, has simply been shunted out of his awareness.

There is no doubt that Huntford's critique, if at times heavily loaded with pejorative epithets, not to say slanted facts (Charles XII was possibly, not probably, killed by a Swedish bullet) is extraordinarily acute. It is a major study by an unsympathetic observer of Swedish social democracy in all its aspects.

What the author perhaps does not sufficiently consider is the shortage, in the Swedish context, of available alternatives. The regime and ethos may be utterly one‐dimensional: but then, so was the Lutheran dispensation before it. Swedish politics have no Tory tradition, which could countervail the Social Democrats and prevent a clique of administrators and intellectuals — Huntford puts their number at 300—from stampeding 8 million people into what at times is unquestionably one‐dimensional thinking and values.

Where he is certainly right is in seeing the Government's success as rooted in basic Swedish attitudes. In most countries two or three men only have to agree, for a fourth to challenge them. In Sweden not so. The fourth Swede will feel morally obliged to agree, too; or else keep his mouth shut. As for the metaphysical, theological and psychological stances of the Western tradition and its often anguished choices, he is pretty sure he can manage without them: After all, they won't make the weather any warmer, will they?

If this is how Swedes want to order things in Sweden, then, it seems to me, they have a perfect right to do so. If, on the other hand, what Roland Huntford fears is plague of Swedish social‐democratic attitudes smiting all the rest of us, then by the very logic of his analysis, his fears must be groundless. It would need more than the export of a few Swedish administrative techniques to turn us all into collusive, one‐dimensional Swedes. Our societies, by reason of their history, are altogether too dialectical.

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A version of this archives appears in print on February 27, 1972, on Page BR6 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Is Sweden a land of one‐dimensional men?; The New Totalitarians By Roland Huntford. 354 pp. New York: Stein & Day. $10. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe